International Connects pt2

               As you all know I have two friends that are over in Korea to teach english in the school systems. I wouldlike to introduce to you my two friends Erica Goodrich and Ryan Hurd III. I only spoke with Ryan very briefly this week because of the disaster that has happen over in Japan and the last thing he wanted to talk about was teaching anything because he was still shaken up from what he had experience and when we briefly talked he sent me a message on facebook to let me know he was okay and was in the process of trying to get back to the states. When I spoke to Erica I was able to speak with her briefly on the poverty level in China and how is it compared to being in the United States.
          
                        
                    Erica began to tell me how the area she is in she hasn't experience any poverty areas, but she did enlighten me on the poverty that is in the rural area Beijing were she is doing her teaching. As we were talking I couldn't believe half of the stuff she was telling me because she expressed to me that China's poverty is worst than the United States. She made me realize that the United State's poverty is not bad as the media make it seems. Erica also shared with me that one thing that maybe different with the United States governement and China's governement is that China's goverenment works hard to almost immediately to resolve their issues to make it better.  Once Erica and I was finished talking I researched on some of the things she shared with me and this is what I found.


             

              The 1990s saw the most radical economic restructuring in China since gradualist economic reform began in 1978. Three important reform measures may have contributed to the growth  of poverty: food price, social welfare, and enterprise reforms. Before reform, food prices in urban China were highly subsidised through a coupon ration system, whereby coupons were distributed according to the number of family members and their ages. In the late 1970s and early 1980s market orientated reforms in the agriculture sector led to significant increases in production and to the introduction of an urban two-tier food price system, in that urban households received subsidised food coupons but were also free to purchase better and more varieties of food in the market place. Gradually, however, the government increased subsidised food prices so that two-tier prices were almost equal to each other (Tang, 1998). When the government finally abolished food coupons in 1993, workers were compensated by an explicit wage subsidy at a universal rate. Households with more non-working members, however, were disadvantaged because food coupons had been distributed according to the number of household members and their ages, while the explicit wage subsidies were distributed only to household working members. In addition, financial help for transportation, rent, and many other consumption items were switched from implicit price subsidies to explicit income subsidies. All these changes would have had an adverse impact on large households with less working members ( Tang,1998).

I can't help but think how this makes the United States lok at this point.